Buonanni, one of the most learned Jesuits of his time and was a pupil of Athanasius Kircher, and in 1680 succeeded his master as teacher of mathematics at the Collegium Romanum; in 1698, he was appointed curator of the Kircherian Museum, which he described in this book Museum Collegii Romani Kircherianum (1709) He took it on to restore the Kircherianum and this book is a monument to that effort. It describes in words and 171 engravings what was to be found in the awesome and astounding collection. Natural history and and antiquities are strongly represented (e.g., the final 48 plates are of shells!), on pages 309-10 we learn of Instrument musica, et authomata diversa. Astronomy and Miscrospy.

389G Buonanni, Filipposlide projector389G Buonanni, FilippoMicroscope

Erudite in a number of fields, including numistmatics and ecclesiastical history (writing on both subjects), Buonanni made extensive studies in the natural sciences; he constructed his own microscope with three lenses (according to Tortona╒s system), which proved to be an ingenious mechanism for continual observation. In his ‘Ricreazione dell ochio e della mente nell observazione della chiocciole’ (1681) a work valuable for its many illustrations of shells, he explicitly affirmed his belief in the spontaneous generation of mollusks and rekindled the controversy over generation that had flared in 1671 between Kircher and Francesco Redi.

389G Buonanni, Filippo

Buonanni’s position was anachronistic, since the Aristotleian theory of spontaneous generation had been disproved by Redi in his “Esperienze intorno all generazione degli insetti (1668)” and by Marcello Malpighi, who had demonstrated the pathogenesis of oak galls from the development of fertilized insect eggs in his Anatome plantarum (1679). He based his belief in the spontaneous generation of mollusks partly on the authority of Aristotle and Kircher and partly on a report by Camillo Picchi of Ancona.he was convinced, as he stated in his Ricreazione, that the mollusks had no hearts. If this were so, they had no blood; Aristotle had written that no bloodless animal is oviparous, and that all conches are generated spontaneously by the mud – oysters by dirty mud, the others by sandy mud. Convinced that the conches were heartless and bloodless, Buonanni believed that both observation and authority supported the idea of spontaneous generation. – Dictionary of Scientific Biography p.591